topped

At this time of year, just one week now before Barn Dance, Sturts Farm is overtaken by a general frenzy of lawn mowing, hedge trimming, strimming and even power washing. In these critical two weeks we probably burn more fossil fuel than in the whole of the rest of the summer. Suddenly the farmyard is almost sparkling clean, the hedges have pulled themselves together, the car park is free from weeds, the village green is short and striped and even Neill’s flowerbed is nearly ready for public viewing.

I was feeling a bit left out from all this tidying up, as so far our contribution from the garden team has been to carry on hoeing the carrots in Sunny Acres and try to pretend nothing unusual is going on. But yesterday Sebastian taught me how to use the topper. The topper is basically a big lawnmower that goes on the back of the tractor. You are meant to use it to tidy up a field after the cows have been grazing; it cuts down any tufty grass, thistles, docks and such like that the cows didn’t fancy eating, and helps to stop the pasture being taken over by inedible weeds. It is less dangerous and less precise than the actual mower on the tractor that we use for cutting the grass to make hay or silage. In the garden, Henning has traditionally used the topper to roughly mow the grass round the edge of the field, on the headlands, and also the green manure leys.

Topping has been on my to do list for a couple of weeks at least, but somehow never quite happened. It nearly didn’t happen yesterday either; just hitching the machine up to the tractor proved fraught with difficulties. First of all I had to tie the link arms of the tractor together with baler twine to get them lined up with machine properly, then the top link on the tractor was too long, so I swapped it for another one which then didn’t have the right size pin, and when I stole a pin off another tractor, the PTO was stuck and wouldn’t lengthen to reach the tractor. Sebastian very patiently helped me through all these calamities and also managed to unstick the PTO by taking it off the tractor, hanging it up on a chain and attaching a heavy weight on the other end of it. Anyway, eventually we got started, and then I spent most of the rest of the day driving round and round the garden and Sunny Acres encased in my ear defenders, topping.

In a way it seems sad and wrong to expend a lot of time and energy cutting down the joyful profusion of growing greenery round the edges of the fields and in the weedy patches that never got sown with green manure, turning them in to something flat and civilised. At one point on the far side of the potatoes I was driving through amazing grass taller than the bonnet of the tractor. In the weed patch between Eden’s grain and his carrots, the grass seed heads were waving in a beautiful wide sea in a dozen hues of grey and brown and purple. William asked me why I was topping at all, and Sebastian persuaded me not to do the bit beyond the hedge in the garden where the poppies are growing. There is, I think, though, something right and satisfying in finding order and edges, cutting down the thistles before they seed everywhere, keeping the brambles and bracken in the field edges at bay.

Perhaps there are different ways of approaching it through. I’d like to buy a scythe one day. And I have a vision of gardening smaller and more intimately, where, if you don’t use a tractor, you don’t need a big wide headland for turning around in, which means you don’t have even half as much grass to keep mowing. And perhaps a garden that is less flat and straight in its own right too; a garden in three dimensions instead of two.

hedging our bets

The new shape of the garden started to become a reality for me this afternoon. It wasn’t really in the plan for this afternoon; we were going to hoe through all our root crops, what with it being a root day, and cart some muck up to Sunny Acres ready for the pumpkins, what with them being overdue for planting. But hoeing the barely-germinated carrots and beetroots isn’t a job that most people can manage, and somehow in an inspired and possibly foolish move, we all spent the afternoon mulching the barely established hedge instead.

This hedge is part of the grand vision Henning created for a smaller, enclosed garden with a thick hedge laid out along according to the golden mean in a gently swooping spiral from the barn extension down to the watermeadows. Early in the spring we enthusiastically started digging out an old hedge by hand one afternoon and, with the help of the front loader, managed to replant a bit of it along the line of the new hedge. Since that afternoon of enthusiasm the whole hedge project has been more or less put on hold in favour of more pressing and more achievable tasks. The plants, though, have mostly, miraculously, survived despite the lack of rain and almost complete neglect.

Then a couple of weeks ago, when it was silage making day, Sebastian mowed the long grass at the far end of the garden and around the headlands of Sunny Acres with the tractor. But then left the cut grass lying on the field because it wasn’t worth sending round the baler for such small fiddly amounts. And just yesterday Ruben mowed the area beyond the soft fruit ready for his chickens. So we currently have a huge quantity of grass clippings and nearly-hay at our disposal. Some of it is destined for incorporation in to a smart new compost heap soon. And today a large quantity of it became hedge mulching material. The whole Thursday afternoon garden team (except Debbie who was looking after the dried elderflowers) set to with rakes and wheelbarrows, and I recovered the smaller saplings that had disappeared in to the long grass and weeds. By the end of the afternoon the whole first quarter of the hedge was roughly mulched, so now I can begin to imagine what this new garden could look like.

PS Apologies for the lack of blogging activity. It reflects not a scarcity of garden activity, but rather a surplus. I am just uploading lots of pictures of silage making and polytunnels and pigs in the garden and such like, so do have a look…

the man who does no digging

Last week we went on an expedition to visit the man who does no digging. Otherwise known as Charles Dowding. He writes books about no dig gardening, and is mildly famous. Perhaps more importantly, he actually does very successful no dig gardening in his garden in Somerset, and very kindly allowed a troop of no less than seventeen Sturts Farm gardeners to inspect his patch last Friday afternoon.

It’s kind of traditional that the garden team and the farm team each do an ‘outing’ at least once a year, to visit other farms or gardens and learn about how they work. We never did one of these outings last year, so this was my first. Duncan and I had both wanted to visit Charles and his garden at Lower Farm for months, and especially with the grand chaos and infinite possibilities of the garden redesign underway, we thought it would be a good time to find out more about his no-dig methods.

It was an hour and half of driving either way, and the journey was almost as entertaining as the garden. Imagine I’m sitting on the back seat of the caravel. On my right is Jane gently snoozing, waking occasionally to make urgent enquiries about the proximity of teabreak. On my left is John, singing songs from the shows under his breath and, from time to time joining the general conversation. The general conversation drifts erratically across topics as varied as silage making, recycling, and what we might have for supper, but the basis of it all is a non-stop audio description of the passing countryside supplied by Neill and Robert sitting up ahead. All the way there and back.

The garden itself was very impressive. Smaller than I’d imagined; less than an acre, on a north facing slope and down a narrow lane twisting and plunging through wooded valleys and farm land. Charles grows mostly salad leaves, as that’s where the money is, but he also had beautiful spinach and parsnips and apple trees and tomatoes and cucumbers and lots more. He literally does no digging, but every autumn spreads a thick layer of well rotted muck or compost on all his beds. The result is a strong, undisturbed soil with plenty of nutrients and very few weeds. Plus, because there is no cultivation needed in the spring, or between crops, Charles can start sowing and planting early, and, for example, plant his cucumbers straight in to the gaps where he’s harvesting early carrots from the polytunnel. The whole garden was immaculate; nowhere did we see a weedy patch or a failed crop or an area that had run away with itself. At the same time it was full of life and diversity, with a band of hedging and wild flowers halfway up, flowers dotted here and there, cordon apple trees between the beds, mesh on the polytunnel door neatly patched up with string, a cat basking in the sunshine.

We saw some simple experiments exploring the differences between a no-dig bed right next to a dug bed growing exactly the same crops, and crops sown on roots days versus ‘nothing’ days growing side by side. We tasted sea kale flowers, and heard about the importance of keeping tunnels and greenhouses well ventilated. We saw the effect of tractors slowly pushing soil down slope in the neighbouring field, admired spectacularly healthy looking crops, asked questions about sowing and harvesting and carried home some delicious bags of salad after handing over a couple of wedges of Sturts Farm cheese.

I think everyone really enjoyed the day, even if some of us were more interested in the picnic lunch than the gardening. Duncan, Caroline and I all came home inspired, and resolved to do no more digging – at least on part of the garden inside this fabled hedge that we’re meant to be planting. For me it was fantastic to be able to see something really working in practice, and to be able to share that experience with pretty much the whole of the rest of the garden team. So next time I’m enthusing about not digging and using more muck and harvesting salad leaves, I’ll hopefully get some spark of recognition from my faithful gardeners…

first

Yesterday I harvested the first courgettes, from the greenhouse. We are going to fry them up with the first of Neill’s garlic for lunch in a minute.

On Wednesday we each ate half a strawberry at tea break time. They weren’t quite the very first strawberries, but close enough. Sebastian had the very very first properly rich red ripe one on Monday, but didn’t quite realise its significance at the time. The birds ate a few too, and Ruben, almost quicker than the birds, had a couple of stained red handfuls for himself before we got the strawberry netting fixed on Thursday.

The first outdoor lettuces are ready to harvest. We’re just trying to eat up the last of the indoor ones, which have been hastily pulled out to make way for tomatoes and sweetcorn in the old polytunnel.

This week we sent the first of our early greenhouse carrots to the market. They are clean and bright and fresh and crunchy orange, especially after the big tired old grey carrots stored from last year. It would be criminal to peel these carrots; criminal almost to cook them even. Though they are fantastic roasted whole. Ruben and Brendan and Alexander have been enjoying baby carrots straight out of the ground for weeks, but the rest of us were waiting for them to be a decent size before we started harvesting. In the end, the need to plant tomatoes pushed the decision to pull out a whole bed of beautiful carrots, which are, in my opinion just the perfect size anyway.

The first beetroots should perhaps have been larger, but they are just beginning to bolt in the heat of the polytunnel, so we started on harvesting delicious baby beetroot this week too. Also recommended roasted whole.

I’ve been hearing the first real cuckoo calling this week; on and on, loud and clear from the woods.

rain gauge

Rain gauge empty since forever

6:30am – 5mm
7:30am – 10mm

Still raining

Ironically and inevitably, the drip irrigation is running in the greenhouse.

nor a drop to drink

I just finished drilling the beetroot as the rain started this evening. The first rain on dusty dry ground is an amazing smell, like the earth coming back to life. Before the rain, low dark clouds moved in and a ferocious wind whipped up clouds of dust from the field. It’s terribly dry. Hasn’t rained here for what feels like months; certainly for weeks. Every day, I look up the weather forecast on the internet and see a row of big fat sunshines for the next twenty four hours; next five days. Sometimes there’s rain forecast on day four or five, but it’s like tomorrow; it never arrives, always just out of reach, always in just a few days’ time.

So we’ve been thinking about water quite a lot. Before Easter, we brought down all the big black irrigation pipes from Sunny Acres. They are light weight, but long and awkward and it took Sebastian and Robert and several helpers half a day to bring them all down. Then Henning initiated Duncan in to the mysteries of the Sunny Acres irrigation system. It was one of Henning’s projects last year, finally set up and working, after delays and tribulations, just in time for the late planting of the leeks in July and then the unusually wet August. He never quite finished it how he wanted it, though, so all the pipes had to come back down to the garden to be fitted out with new couplings, which does make it much easier to clip them together and take them apart again. Then on Good Friday, as part of the traditional morning of common work, Henning and Sebastian and Robert and Bob took all the pipes back up to Sunny Acres and got the whole system working again.

This is how it works. Underneath the farm yard in a big concrete tank. All the runoff water from the farm yard collects in to that tank, so it gradually fills with a rich black brew of rain water mixed with a sort of slurry from the yard, the water from washing down the dairy, and the poisonous looking stuff that seeps out of the bottoms of the muck heaps. That black water can then be pumped up the track to a man hole by Sunny Acres. There, we connect one of the big black pipes, run it all the way along the bottom of the field, and link it up to a set of three sprinklers. Henning made a filter that sits in the pipe just before the sprinklers, so they don’t get clogged up with slurry, and the pump works on a timer so it can be switched on for half an hour, an hour or two hours. All pretty straight forward really, and a great way of catching and storing some of the water and nutrients from the farm yard and applying them where we need them in dry weather.

After getting thoroughly splattered with stinking black slurry water, Henning got the sprinklers going and had them running for several hours. I wasn’t too sure about spraying all this stinky water on the onions, but under the combined circumstances of drought and an underground tank of slurry overflowing in to the ditch to the stream, it seemed like a pretty good option. The first time I moved the sprinklers to set them up on a new patch I had a terrible battle sloshing and slipping about in smelly sludgy mud where the sprinklers had leaked, panicking as the water surged out of the pipes when I disconnected the sprinklers, and then struggling to heave around suddenly not-so-lightweight pipes now filled with litres and litres of water. I learned quite fast though, that it’s best to disconnect the pipes as close to the tap as possible, and so that the spare water gushes on the the grass rather than the bare soil of the field. Moving the pipes is one of those jobs that for one person takes an hour of struggle, sweat, and possibly swearing, whereas with two people it’s twenty minutes of quite simple and sensible work.

So good so far. But then on Easter Sunday the sprinklers stopped going round, and each only poured a gentle trickle of water on to its neighbouring cabbage. After a good deal of running up and down between pumps, taps, and sprinklers, in between consulting with Henning who was tied to his office in the house, it appeared that the problem was not in the sprinklers, or the pipes, but either in the pumps or the tanks. Further investigations by William, Sebastian and Henning after Easter revealed that the water level in the tank might be too low, or perhaps that the tank is full with sludge and slurry rather than water. Which rather surprised us all because we thought the tank was unimaginably enormous and effectively bottomless when it comes to doing a bit of watering in Sunny Acres. So now rather than worrying about how to stop the tank overflowing in to the ditch, we’re working on ideas to make it fill up quicker. It’s quite fascinating to piece together a map of the network of drains and pipes and tanks under the concrete of the farm yard. No one (except possibly Markus) knows exactly how it all links up and what goes where. But today Stefan blocked up one underground pipe that should now divert the rainwater collected off the barn roof in to the tank under the yard, rather than straight to the ditch. And Henning has devised a cunning plan to collect the trickle of water running off the field from the land drains which now requires some lucky people to spend a morning digging a barrel in to the mud of the ditch.

As that thread of the water and irrigation story unfolds, we’ve also been using gallons and gallons of mains drinking water to irrigate the greenhouses and polytunnels, which seems close to criminal, but is currently the only option (other than letting everything wilt and die). We use main drinking water, too, to water in the lettuces and celeriac and kohl rabi and brussel sprouts newly planted out in to the dusty of Sunny Acres. That took Duncan a morning just to get all the hosepipes wheeled up to the field and connected across all the beds from the tap in the far corner by the water meadows. And then several more hours for Owen or Duncan or Sarah standing by each plant in turn, soaking it, moving to the next one, soaking it, moving to the next one… Hosepipes, I am sure, have some special magic that means they get tangled and twisted and knotted up even when they are lying still in what should have been a nice neat coil on the side of the grass. So then every time you might want to start using one, or move one, it takes half an hour just to untangle the thing before you even start with the watering.

Our other criminal use of precious mains drinking water is with the ingeniously clever watering tractor. It’s a sprinkler in the shape of a tractor, that can slowly propel itself along a bed, guided by the hosepipe paid down in front of it. It’s entirely powered by the flow of water through the mechanism inside, and can more or less be left to get on with the job. Earlier this week it developed a leak, though, which makes the whole thing fail; where it leaks under the tractor, the soil turns to mud and the tractor effectively does slow motion wheel spin, gets stuck and becomes a stationary sprinkler. Fortunately John, the multitalented bicycle repair man now graduated to tractor maintenance man, fixed the leak for me, and now the little watering tractor is back in action again.

So that’s a lot of stuff about watering and water, which is now finally bucketing down out of the sky. Hurrah.

Apart from messing around with water and irrigation, in the nearly a month since I last wrote, I’ve also been planting tomatoes, going on holiday, having my birthday, harrowing and ridging potatoes, hunting Easter eggs, sowing Easter grass, drilling leeks, making ridges for carrots and parsnips, ordering chicken food, not quite getting sunburnt, and digging up biodynamic preparations. Not quite in that order.

planting onions

It’s unseasonably hot and sunny, and we’ve been planting onions for two days solid last week. Planting onions is a good job. It’s a tediously slow and boring job on the one hand, but it’s also a very sociable, simple job that almost any one can join in with. For me it’s also almost like a holiday to know that today I am planting onions in the sunshine all day and that’s it. I’m not running about organising multiple small teams of people, managing a dozen different jobs or projects over the course of the day, trying to prioritise and keep an eye on things in three different places, explaining which lettuces to harvest and how to thin the carrots. I’m just planting onions.

Happily, everyone else seems to enjoy planting onions too. We plant the onions sets by hand, plugging along with our yellow buckets of onions and our stripey bamboo measuring sticks. I made up the beds a couple of weeks ago using the bed maker machine, but they were still full of little clods of grass (we should have rotovated them earlier on, but I didn’t realise and it’s too late now), so I went over again with the bed maker, and then we hand weeded them, with a team of people picking out the grass lumps in front of the team of people sticking the onions in. The benefit of having gone over with the bed maker machine twice is that the soil is really soft and fluffy, so we can just push the onions straight in with no need for dibbers or furrows. Then I cover them up using the push hoe with two ridging bodies; it makes a small ridge over the line of onions to be sure they are covered, and planted in good and deep where the moisture is and where the birds can’t peck them out.

We plant the onions three lines in a bed, and 10cm apart in the lines. The beds are 100m long, and we’ve planted three and a half beds so far, with probably about half a bed worth of onions still to go in. I think that works out as over 10,000 onions. Fortunately when it comes to straight forward jobs like planting onions, we have a very substantial work force here, especially when not just the gardeners, but also the farmers, are drafted in to help out. Because the work is quite slow, can be done practically sitting down, and involves working close together in groups, it’s a great opportunity to chat and gossip as we inch our way along the beds. It’s also nice as different individuals come and go during the day, bringing their own news and conversation and characters with them.

I say it’s a bit like a holiday, and that is almost the atmosphere in this incredible warmth and sunshine as we plaster on the factor 30 and sit on the dusty dry sandy soil of our not-quite-beach in the middle of the field. But I also have the feeling of really carrying something there; of keeping the work together, explaining the system to each new person who turns up to help, checking we’re not accidentally double planting or mixing the white and red onions, making sure we stop early enough to get down to tea break on time, shuffling the teams as the planters catch up with the weeders; being somehow the will behind this task of planting 10,000 onions by hand.